Celly’s 3 Hashtags 4
Back-2-School

9 min readAug 8, 2014

Let’s build #Movements with
#Authenticity where people
#LearnOutLoud

Raphael School of Athens by Raphael — wikimedia commons. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Back-To-School Greetings!

For over two years, I’ve been trying to highlight how participants across the learning ecosystem — students, families, teachers, staff, district officials, coaches, club organizers, and community members — use Celly for diverse, interactive learning scenarios.

Recently, I spoke with Gabriel and Darek about what they saw and heard at ISTE 2014 in Atlanta. Amid anecdotes and praise from enthusiastic Celly fans, teachers, principals, and district officials, the most valuable marketing feedback I heard was that a few attendees asked,

“How does Celly compare to <UNRELATED_VENDOR_XYZ>?”

Because several ISTE visitors didn’t grok our story or see our competition the way we do, and because we occasionally get email and tweets asking about random product comparisons, it’s clear Celly needs to do a better job communicating our raison d’être, philosophy, and vision.

So here’s my attempt to paint Celly’s image with three hashtags.

#Movements

Celly’s raison d’être is to
power movements with
conversation and action.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎) — photo of the artwork. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Whether you are transforming learning outcomes by engaging students and parents, flipping your classroom, enabling BYOD, offering 1-to-1, encouraging project-based learning, building professional development networks, or teaching digital citizenship — learning movements need a wide, rich communication platform to reach and engage diverse stakeholders.

Unlike niche communication services, e.g., focused on one-way messages or mass notifications, Celly’s goal is to propel your learning movement far beyond homework reminders or campus alerts. In addition to one-way messages, you can exchange two-way group messages, moderate discussions, conduct polls and surveys, directly message members, take notes, share photos, files, and Youtube/Vine videos, broadcast conversations to people around you, and connect groups into collaborative learning networks.

For integration, you can utilize Celly’s API, message export/archive functions, and link to social feeds like RSS and Twitter. We recently developed an embeddable widget that lets you place Celly into your web pages too.

I’m happy at least one ISTE visitor got Celly’s platform message ;-) Thanks Kevin!

https://twitter.com/BowerKM/status/483367581081169920

Because Celly provides multiple applications for multiple stakeholders, you don’t need to teach, learn, and support many separate apps. Rather than investing in one-off solutions for alerting, polling, group collaboration, file sharing, news curation, etc., you can get all these features in a single integrated platform to support your favorite #edtech movements:

#Authenticity

We believe …
Words build movements.
Words inspire learning.
Words level playing fields.
Words create change.
… So words must be free.

Gentlemen in conversation, Eastern Han Dynasty by Anonymous Chinese artist — Scanned from Anil de Silva’s book The Art of Chinese Landscape Painting (1968). Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Movements that cultivate transparency and inclusiveness thrive.

Open, free-flowing conversation creates trust and engagement that unlocks learning, creativity, and collaboration in the classroom and beyond school walls.

From the start, Celly has been co-designed with teachers, students, parents, and instructional technologists for open, two-way group communication. To ensure safety, phone numbers and private information are never shared and members can flag and block unwanted participation. To gracefully scale conversations — from two people to thousands — curated chat lets moderators keep conversations on-topic and free from redundancy and cyberbullying.

Full engagement requires dialogue not monologue.

As a parent of a teenage student, I know first hand the frustration of receiving one-way reminders and notifications but not being able to reply to my child’s teachers or school staff members. One-way alerts — from teachers, principals, or district admins — offer useful attendance information or homework reminders but ultimately relegate participation to passive observation rather than active discourse.

To improve engagement and participation, school districts and universities are creating Guardian Triangles — mini private social networks for every student in every class with three types of members: the student, the teacher, and the family. Guardian Triangles establish a private space where students, teachers, and parents may communicate securely and freely about assignments, progress, schedules, attendance, and other issues.

Rather than waiting passively for one-way, periodic status reports, parents are continuously engaged as active participants in their student’s education. The (geometric) arrangement promotes safety too since the nature of interaction between any two members in the triangle is visible and accountable to a third party. Teachers, administrators, and technology specialists tell us the Guardian Triangle is one of the smallest, cheapest, simplest communication tools that can be deployed en-masse to create dramatic improvement in student and parent engagement. If your school/district is interested, please email support@cel.ly and we can help you get started.

Authenticity leads to emergence.

Backchannels, historical role-playing, feedback polls and tiplines, field trip studies, team/band/club groups, school fundraising events, district weather alerts, issue inventories and get-out-the-vote campaigns — teachers, instructional technologists, parents, coaches, principals, and public information officers are continually finding new applications for Celly in the classroom, in school halls, on the playground, and in the community. District CIOs tell us Celly’s short-form conversations mirror real world workplace environments and create spontaneous opportunities to teach digital citizenship and educate students on sensible use of social media tools. For a great rollup of how Celly transforms the classroom please read Celly superstar Kimberly Hoffman Kanof’s blog post.

Authenticity removes barriers — whether they are school walls or dated tools, pedagogy, or curricula — by embracing openness, change, and discovery.

Trust and transparency empower student voices and teach accountability. Unlike walled-garden, classroom-centric social networks and learning management systems, Celly deliberately empowers students to create their own networks to communicate with each other. We’re amazed by the variety of applications that students think up: from link crew mentoring — where upperclassmen mentor younger classmates — to student-led networks for clubs, plays, teams, student government, class elections, and yearbook. My own daughter’s school uses Celly to coordinate Junior State of America trips and proceedings.

Here are great examples of emergence written by teachers …

#LearnOutLoud

Celly’s vision is a world where students co-create knowledge by sharing opinions, ideas, questions, answers, curiosity, and inspiration freely with peers, teachers, parents, coaches, and subject-matter-experts in communities of practice that link together in a World Wide Web of Conversations.

Kandinsky Composition VII. Via Wikipedia

Learning is an essential skill. Continuous learning and sharing of knowledge are vital for success in school and the real world.

Traditionally, learning systems, policies, and frameworks were built on rigid pedagogical hierarchies — with educators, staff, and administrators at the top and students and parents and community members near the bottom.

Cellphones are now ubiquitous so we can ask questions and reply with answers instantly to and from anybody in the world.

Instead of hierarchy, we can now build wirearchy, “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”.

Wirearchy creates a world where we can learn-out-loud:

A world where everybody has autonomy and agency to self-organize and connect personal learning networks where power and authority emerge through knowledge and connections rather than position and rank in a command and control hierarchy.

A world where learning is ambient, continuous, and transcends classroom walls to include playbooks on the sports field, music scores on the stage, events in neighborhoods, issues in local communities, and on-the-job training in businesses.

Celly’s priorities to help you learn-out-loud are:

1. Closing The Digital Divide

We need to bridge the digital access divide and make sure everybody is connected to the learning ecosystem.

Celly is designed for inclusion. Students, parents, teachers, principals, district officials, coaches, bus drivers, etc. can access Celly from virtually any device — an SMS-enabled feature-phone, smartphone, Web browser, or email. We’ve even enabled usage of SMS internationally without the need for an SMS gateway. Nucleus lets you turn your Android phone into an SMS hub. This means people can replace our five digit phone number 23559 with your phone’s number and Celly will work magically anywhere.

2. Linking Movements Together

Celly is introducing Movements — a way to group public Celly conversations about particular topics. For example, all public cells defined with the #edtech hashtag are grouped on a web page.

You can start your own Movement by grouping cells with your own hashtags and viewing them at cel.ly/tag/YourTagHere. Movement pages are automatically generated for all cell hashtags. To create your own page for collecting and sharing cells by topic, simply add your tag in each cell’s description field. Here are some example for how to use Movements:

Group alert cells, study group cells, and special project cells for your classroom on one accessible webpage (e.g. cel.ly/tag/History101)
Collect a community’s cells in one place for an event or campaign (e.g. cel.ly/tag/ClimateSummit2014)
See what conversations are happening in your city and contribute yours (e.g. cel.ly/tag/PDX)

3. Enabling On-The-Go Discovery And Learning

Looking forward, Celly will soon be introducing a new wave of social communication that will let people broadcast what matters to them and form tribes of interest based on location.

We hope this innovation inspires new learning applications from digital badges to scavenger hunts to artistic self-expression to political engagement. If this sounds interesting, please let us know if you would like to become a beta tester.

4. Incorporating Your Feedback

We value people who reach out to us and challenge us. Celly builds tools. But you are the real experts. We take our cues from you.

Your feature requests, criticisms, and viewpoints about privacy and how to encourage good behavior in social platforms are deeply appreciated. Such conversations have inspired plans for an on-boarding option that will enable cell creators to specify a list of users with specific identifiers (such as email address) that can be used as validation criteria. In this way, teachers can pre-assign, and thus know, how Celly usernames are mapped to students. This identity-based on-boarding scheme will encourage accountability when it comes to shared communication. Thank you to everybody who cares enough to reach out to us. Please keep engaging us! Your feedback is how we #LearnOutLoud.

Summary

Call-To-Adventure

Dream Journey among Rivers and Mountains, Number 150 LACMA M.75.25 (2 of 8) by Cheng Zhengkui (China, Hebei Province, 1604–1676) — Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Celly believes mobile phones have the power to transform learning.

With #edtech leadership and BYOD platform support, mobile communication can evolve from an unwanted classroom distraction into an authentic, state-of-the-art method for learning both inside and outside school walls.

I hope this blog post helps clarify Celly’s core purpose, values, and vision.

If not, we are fortunate and grateful to have skilled teachers, instructional experts, and journalists who dedicate precious time to sort out our story. They are way more articulate and credible than I am. Here’s a sample of what some Celly fans are saying:

Celly wants to build a connected world where academia abounds, where the ability to learn is around us at all times, just a message away.

Please join our call-to-adventure!

Let’s build #Movements
with #Authenticity
where people #LearnOutLoud

With Gassho,

Russell Okamoto
A Parent & Public Cellyzen

Celly’s 3 Hashtags 4Back-2-School

#Movements

#Authenticity

#LearnOutLoud

Summary

Written by Russell Okamoto

Celly’s 3 Hashtags 4
Back-2-School